“I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”
There was a night—years ago—when I sat alone on a cold floor, surrounded by the debris of everything I had built. I had lost my name, my friends, my future. The headlines had spoken. The world had judged. My voice was no longer my own. In that silence, I remembered Frodo.
Not the brave Frodo. Not the one who left the Shire with hope in his heart. No—I remembered the Frodo who could no longer smile, who no longer slept, who sat in darkness with a Ring that had eaten away his soul. The Frodo who whispered, “I can’t do this, Sam.”
That night, I understood something most people miss: Frodo didn’t win.
At Mount Doom, he failed. The Ring claimed him in the end. And yet—the story did not end in failure. Why? Because mercy had been shown to a wretched, broken creature long before. Because Sam never left. Because Gollum, caught in the web of grace and obsession, danced to the edge of doom and fell with the Ring.
“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall,” Tolkien once wrote in a letter. “At least not for human minds as we know them and have them.”
That fall—the moment we can no longer hold ourselves upright—is where the story begins to burn with meaning.
In my own life, I’ve known that fall. Not once, but many times. I’ve worn the Ring that whispers lies: you are alone, you are unworthy, there is no return from this. The Ring is not always gold and inscription. Sometimes it’s shame. Sometimes it’s addiction. Sometimes it’s simply the weight of being human.
There were days I wanted to disappear into the cracks of my own Mount Doom. Days when I believed I had become too tainted to return to the Shire of who I used to be. I looked in the mirror and saw not Frodo, but Gollum—twisted by grief, consumed by obsession with what had been lost.
And then someone reached out. Not with fanfare or grand speeches—just presence. A message. A moment of stillness. My Sam didn’t carry me up the mountain with words. They carried me by staying.
There are those in life—our Sams—who never leave. Who see our fall, yet stay. Who carry us when we can no longer walk. And there are those moments—like Gollum’s slip—where grace intervenes in ways we never planned. We cannot script redemption. It is born in the fires we survive.
The truth is: Frodo bore the Ring all the way to the end. He gave everything. It cost him peace, sleep, innocence, and eventually his place in the world. He saved Middle-earth, but it broke him. And still, that sacrifice meant something.
So too with us.
Not every pain will be healed in this lifetime. Not every burden lifted. But if you’ve carried your Ring this far, then you are not weak—you are worthy. Your scars are not shameful. They are sacred.
I used to think that survival meant failure. That if I didn’t emerge stronger, cleaner, victorious, I hadn’t truly made it out. But Tolkien taught me that sometimes, just making it out—just crawling through fire with some part of your soul intact—is the victory.
The burden is not proof of your failure. It is the path that leads through fire to the edges of healing.
If you feel like Frodo—broken, worn, changed forever—I offer you this scroll as Sam once offered lembas bread: a small, simple thing that might help you take one more step.
You don’t have to destroy the Ring today.
You just have to keep walking.
🌀 This scroll is part of the When All Other Lights Go Out book of scrolls.
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